Imagine all the things you would accomplish if you never procrastinated

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Narrated by Marco Patricio

Imagine all the things you would accomplish if you never procrastinated.
Maybe you’d have learned that instrument by now, or written that
novel or would have that great beach body. If I never procrastinated
I would have been done this video 6 months ago when I first started it.

So I set out to answer a simple question: Can I solve procrastination forever?

And honestly I thought defeating procrastination would be this straightforward thing. All I
have to do is work out what’s going on in the brain to cause the effects of procrastination, stop that thing
from happening and then I wouldn’t procrastinate anymore. But then
when I actually asked a neuroscientist how to stop procrastinating and he said this:

“People think that you can turn on an MRI and see where something is happening in the brain but the truth is that’s not so. This stuff is vastly more complicated than people are saying. So procrastination is a human level subject that we do not understand in terms of the brain and we’re not even close to those things we’re not even in the league or in the century of those things. So we have theories.”

And at this moment it became extremely obvious why it’s such a hard
thing to solve. Because we don’t actually know what’s happening in
your brain when we procrastinate. All we have are theories and these
theories that tell us what’s probably happening based on what we know
about how the brain works.

So, in search of a way to help me understand my problem, I asked a
psychologist, Dr. Tim Pychyl how to get over procrastination.

And what I got was a lot of theories different theories on how to
stop procrastinating and why people procrastinate. But of all the
reasons he suggested, the one that makes the most sense to me is this:

There’s one part of your brain that’s purely instinctual called the Limbic System. It’s your emotions, your fight or flight. All it cares about is keeping you alive.

Then, over here, there’s this other part that’s kind of wiser and more rational. It’s responsible for your goals, your dreams, your plans for the future. That’s your prefrontal cortex.

Theory

Narrated by Marco Patricio

And the theory is that when you get that feeling of not wanting to
do something your instinctual part springs into action right away.
It doesn’t think about the future. it just tells you to avoid the
task. And you listen.

The other side. The rational side, is slower to act. It thinks
things through. So you procrastinate until that part can remind you
that you’re not dying - you’re just trying to doing something that’s
really hard.

And the paradox here about giving in to feel good is that it
actually makes you feel terrible later. I don't know how to stop
procrastinating and it’s really frustrating.

And with all of these design flaws in the way our brains work I
can’t help but think that solving procrastination is a kind of a
hopeless cause. There might not be any ways to beat procrastination.
Except for this one thing that everyone I talked to kept bringing up: neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity means that your brain can change. It’s like gooey
plastic. And the more plastic your brain is the easier it is to
train it to do what you want. To make and break habits.

So you can develop your brain. And the best way to do it is actually
thousands of years old.

“Really what we want to do is downregulate the limbic system and upregulate the prefrontal cortex. And mindfulness meditation is a path to that.”

The more you meditate, the better you become at making decisions,
and the easier it is to keep on task when you know you have
something important to do. That’s because it actually shrinks that
amygdala - that instinctual part of your brain and it adds more
grey matter to that part that helps you make decisions.

So that may be the way to overcome chronic procrastination. There’s
probably hundreds of theories on how to deal with procrastination or
tips on how to avoid procrastination. But there’s a way for each and
every person to work out how to overcome procrastination in themselves.

So can you get rid of procrastination? Sort of but it’s not really
easy and it does take a lot of practice.

The thing that I realized about procrastination was the one thing I
hoped that I wouldn’t. That everyone deals with it. That there’s no
simple solution. And that you have to experience pain to get through
anything worth doing. And that the best way to stop procrastinating is
to just get started.

Stop procrastinating and take action

Imagine the possibilities if you started something today

How to get overprocrastination

Words by Dayna Winter

Everything I’ve ever accomplished has played out in its final
moments like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, deadlines
achieved by slipping my work under the last remaining inches of a
closing tomb door. Will I ever kick this procrastination thing?

Meh, I’ll think about it later.

If scientists could bore into your brain and track down that one
neuron – that tiny one-in-one-hundred-billion brain flaw, the root
cause of your procrastination – and squash it like an insect,
couldn’t they solve the problem for everyone forever?

The truth is, the reasons people procrastinate (as well as the parts
of the brain that drive those put-it-off behaviours) vary so widely.
Naturally the mechanisms for tackling those causes are equally
diverse.

In my colleague’s recent article (which I avoided reading until
now), he dove into tactics to help entrepreneurs based on specific
motivations for the their procrastination – “Thrill Seekers”, for
example, could benefit from creating last-minute panic with fake
deadlines. Is it really that simple?

Our Studio Team, bent on solving all
of the mysteries of earth and
space, was not satisfied to hover at the surface. What if there was
more to it? They slashed the do-it-later problem wide-open,
relegating one of their own to lab rat status.

“Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping response. It’s not a problem with your time management.”

Marco Patricio, the aforementioned human test subject and producer
of this piece, spiralled down, down, down into a rabbit hole of
research. The “ahas” and the juicy bits were edited into three
minutes, but he learned so much more.

Let’s peek behind the curtain at the making of this film, and
explore the producer’s own face-off with procrastination.

In Marco’s own words:

“(The Happiness Theory) calls back to the history of our existence –
to what it means to be human. We’ve been trained through thousands
of years of evolution to seek instant gratification. It’s what’s
helped us survive as a species – it has driven engineering and
innovation and it’s something that’s uniquely human. When
something is difficult we seek to make it easier. When something
is expensive we seek to make it cheaper. When something is
wasteful we seek to make it more efficient.

This natural element doesn’t fare well in our modern society, with
schedules and deadlines and intangible goals. When we avoid things,
it’s not because we don’t want to do it necessarily, it’s because we
want to feel good. If you can be mindful, you can reframe the
aversion you’re feeling in context of your goals. What do you
actually want from your life? It helps you to see it not as a
personal failure, but as something that’s hardwired into us and
something that can be overcome with practice.”

But what about the other theories? There is so much scientific
speculation around why we procrastinate.

Quick side note…

Most of the data that we do have about procrastination and other
emotion-based human experiences come from fMRIs and the way that
fMRIs measure brain activity makes drawing any real, provable and
testable conclusions extremely difficult. So the techniques to overcome
procrastination that many people offer are based in scientific theory
but can't be proven yet. That's what makes overcoming procrastination so difficult.

The issue with MRIs

The human brain is estimated to make about a trillion
(1,000,000,000,000) calculations a second. And this happens all over
the brain simultaneously. You’ve heard people say that you only use
10% of your brain - but that 10% isn’t local. It’s not a little
corner of your brain that does one thing or another thing. Your
brain shoots signals all over your brain all the time to do
anything.

The issue with MRIs or fMRIs is that they measure the brain activity
over a second over a relatively large group of neurons (about
10,000). It’s a digital camera that lumps every 10,000 pixels
together. So instead of having a very clear, granular image of the
brain activity you have a vague idea of where the activity is taking
place.

How do they measure activity in the first place?

fMRIs measure a signal called BOLD: the blood oxygen level dependent
contrast. It’s a highly disputed system of measurement that
basically shows what areas “light up” when humans are exposed to
certain stimulus or are performing certain activities.

That “lighting up” occurs when oxygenated blood flows into a region
of the brain at a rate that is higher than the baseline. So the
whole system is based on the idea that increased blood flow means
increased neural activity. The process which causes neural activity
requires oxygenated blood - so oxygenated blood flowing to an area
most likely means that the oxygenated blood in the area has just
been used up as the result of a neural process.

But the assumption is exactly that. We don’t know the fine details
of how any of these processes work. Why the blood flows where it
does, what relation it has to neural activity in that area or what
the activity in the area is actually doing are all things that we’re
working towards understanding but don’t have a strong grasp of quite
yet.

All this to say that we don’t “know” very much about why things in
our brain happen the way that they do. We don't know how to beat procrastination.
But we do know the psychology of procrastination. Anything that we do
“know” is very much correlational and there’s very little causational evidence
when it comes to matters of the psychology of the human brain.

As we concluded in the film, no one really knows the answer, but our
expert, Dr. Tim Pychyl touched on three additional theories that are
worth exploring:

Intransitive Preference Structure (Loop)

What is it?

“If I tell you that B is greater than A and C is greater than B, by
transitive relation, you know C is greater than A,” Dr. Pychyl
explains. When stress is applied, however, we become irrational in
how we rank our preferences.

Basically, layman to layman, this theory says that our brain becomes
math-blind. Say you write a to-do list in order of urgency.
Procrastination reorders that list, assigning priority to things you
prefer. “Do it tomorrow” seems insignificant (it’s just one day!)
but over time, several tomorrows add up to “too late”. Our brain
doesn’t do that math.

Here’s an example: it’s Monday and you’re launching a new product on
Thursday and you need to shoot and edit product photos. Your brain
makes day to day preferences for starting it later: do it today < do
it tomorrow < do it Wednesday. But now it’s Wednesday night, and you
haven’t started. Suddenly, at the last minute, you wish you had
started it on Monday, and the preference now loops back: do it
Wednesday < do it Monday.

How to Deal

A commitment device
is a means to “lock” you into doing things that
are difficult (you know, those tasks you typically procrastinate). A
simple example is setting up monthly deposits into a savings account
via automatic withdrawal. Commitment devices might be tools, apps,
or automated tasks. Even peer pressure can be effective: take your
intentions to the streets! Write them in a public forum or share
them in a group to provide accountability outside of yourself.

During the producer’s own journey, he found success in being mindful:

“For me this worked by making a tangible list of things to accomplish, in the order that I want to accomplish them, and then using the pomodoro technique to actually get the work done. Every time I procrastinated doing something, I’d write it down, which would reminded me of that task’s importance (very, very low) in relation to the one I set out to accomplish.”

Affective Forecasting

What is it?

“Affect is just a fancy word for feelings,” Pychyl tells us. When it
comes to feelings, it turns out that the crystal ball is pretty
murky. We assume we’ll be less exhausted or more positive in the
future (and thus more capable of the procrastinated task), which
isn’t always the case. He explains:

“You might say ‘I should go for a run today. I don’t feel like going
for a run today. I’ll go for a run tomorrow at 5:30’. You feel good
because you’ve kept that intention, that noble intention to go for
a run, but you’ve never gotten up at 5:30 to go for a run. That’s
how predictably irrational we are. We’re not very good at
predicting the future.”

How To Deal

Just get started. Eye roll emoji, am I right? We wouldn’t be in this
mess if we could just get started now and not the day after
tomorrow. But what if “doing it” just means doing one little part of
it? One of the core messages in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is
to list the next step. Break up that massive beast of a task. See?
Less scary.

What’s that thing that you procrastinate a lot? For small business
owners, taxes tend to fall into the “tomorrow” pile over and over.
“What’s the first step?”, asks Allen. Maybe it’s just finding an
accountant, downloading an app, or simply organizing receipts in a
folder. Step one is the catalyst for step two and so on. Momentum!

Conversely, the “eat the frog” approach might work better for you.
Pychyl reminds us of this famous quote:

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

Future Self

What is it?

Dr. Pychyl refers to a study conducted by Hal Ersner-Hershfield in
which he used magnetic resonance imaging to see the brain in terms
of blood flow (and essentially which part of the brain is
active). The assumption made is that blood travels to the place in
the brain that’s important in that moment. The participants were
asked to think about their present selves, their future selves, and
then a stranger. When thinking about present self, one part of the
brain is active. When thinking about a stranger, blood flows to a
different part. Makes sense, right? The interesting observation made
was this: while participants were thinking about future self, the
part of the brain highlighted by stranger-thoughts lights up again.

How to Deal

Pychyl says, “Having empathy for future self can be very important
for closing that gap and making present self realize, ‘This isn’t
the best choice in the long run because that’s me and I care about
that person.’"

Researchers found that people who looked at age-enhanced images of
themselves allocated more money to a hypothetical retirement savings
plans,
versus those who looked at images of their current selves.
Most of us don’t have a buddy down at the Bureau to whip off a
digitally-aged rendering of our likeness, but the same effect may be
achieved through imagination.

Conclusion

So, we didn’t solve procrastination. Maybe we just added
complication to an already head-scratching subject. At the end of
the film, the producer leaves us with this:

“The thing that I realized about procrastination was the one thing I hoped that I wouldn’t. That everyone deals with it. That there’s no simple solution. And that you have to experience pain to get through anything worth doing.”